


That Real-Life Love

by TheBluestBluebird



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drowning, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Talking, actually talking about feelings? in my fic?, it's more likely than you think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:54:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29114082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBluestBluebird/pseuds/TheBluestBluebird
Summary: “Hey, dumbass!” Mal shouts out across the water, towards where the crown fucking prince of fucking Auradon went under.  “You’d better be joking!”Nothing.“I’m not going to risk my own neck to save you!” Mal shouts. “Ben! You’d better come up right the fuck now, or I’m going to have to--”Something in the water moves.
Relationships: Ben/Mal (Disney: Descendants)
Kudos: 27





	That Real-Life Love

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Now Suffer All the Children](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27014179) by [TheBluestBluebird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBluestBluebird/pseuds/TheBluestBluebird). 



> y'all remember how the first descendants movie had the main character magically roofie her love interest and then just kind of didn't bring it up ever again??? Yeah. Me too. This isn't quite the fix-it I wanted to write for that today, but it's the setup for one. It's also kind of set in the same 'verse as my other d1 canon divergence fic, so if you're into this one you might be into that one too! 
> 
> Slight warning for talk of drowning and death. It's not super graphic, but if you're bothered by it, this might be one to skip. 
> 
> Title is from Aquaman by Walk the Moon.

Oh, fuck. Fucking hell, Ben’s gone and drowned himself trying to impress her, and now it’s going to be Mal’s fault that the Auradon royalty needs to find a new prince to pin all of their hopes and dreams and shit on, and oh, fuck, he’s really not coming back up. 

Shit. 

“Hey, dumbass!” Mal shouts out across the water, towards where the crown fucking prince of fucking Auradon went under. “You’d better be joking!”

Nothing. 

“I’m not going to risk my own neck to save you!” Mal shouts. “Ben! You’d better come up right the fuck now, or I’m goingto have to--” 

Something in the water moves. 

Mal squeals like a kicked rat and pulls her feet back up. Fuck no, she’s not going in any kind of water that has  _ living things  _ in it, no matter how much this dumb Auradon boy needs her. No fucking way. 

The fish moves again. It’s a little silver thing, just a slip of a fish. It looks like it probably doesn’t even have teeth. 

Okay. Maybe Mal can do this. It’s just a fish, and so far, nothing in Auradon has been hiding anything cool, like teeth or horns or venom. The most exciting thing she’s discovered so far is that a few of the suits of armor around the Auradon Prep castle do, in fact, have real weapons attached to their metal hands, and not just blunt dummy swords. If that’s what passes for danger in this prissy princess land, she can handle a few minnows. 

Mal steps off the ledge. The fish doesn’t immediately attack, which is a point in its favor. If it is dangerous, at least it has the common decency to disguise itself until the right moment.

And Ben still hasn’t resurfaced. Great. That’s just fucking wonderful. Just what Mal needed today. A nice date, and then a drowning. Of course, this boy would pick the one way that actually  _ works  _ to get himself killed. He couldn’t stab himself, or something useful that Mal can heal. Water inhalation is deadly no matter where you are, and fire can only fix so many things before it becomes another problem to deal with.

“Ben?” Mal shouts again, although it comes out a little wobblier this time. “Are you trying to scare me? Is this some Auradon rite of passage thing nobody told me about? Scare your date silly?”

Oh, fucking hell, the water is up to her waist now. It’s getting harder to keep moving forwards.

“I’m scared, you win! Come on, come out, wherever you are!”

The lake water is crystal clear. It’s cold too, so cold that Mal’s legs are tingling. She can’t see a body, although the water looks like it gets darker off by the cliffs, so that would be a good place for one to be hidden, if there is one.

Mal takes another step forward, turning to her path over towards the cliffs. Might as well take a quick look, if it’s going to end in disaster anyway.

Well. More accurately, she tries to turn. What really happens is that, even with the stupid fucking crystal-clear water, she still can’t see things that should be completely fucking obvious, like a slimy, emerald-fucking-green lake rock.

It’s a moment of awful, sickening weightlessness. There’s nothing supporting her body except for the force of the water around her, up to her chest now, and fuck, fuck,  _ this  _ is why she doesn’t swim, damnit.

The thing about the isle is that there’s not a lot of fresh water. There’re the pipes, sure, which bring them rust-filled water from gods only know where. There are bathtubs, in a few of the nicer, older houses. Mal’s seen them. Evie’s castle had one, and a couple of the houses up in the wooded part of the isle that were from the before times and hadn’t been gutted out by a horde of angry villains trying to wring the least miserable existence they can manage from an inhospitable rock designed specifically to make the unwilling residents as miserable as possible.

Maleficent got what she wanted from the isle. She got a horde of loyal followers, and henchmen out the ears, and a daughter who she could mold in her image and use to bring about her eventual vengeance. What Maleficent didn’t want in her kingdom-in-exile was a castle full of modern comforts, and so, despite being the daughter of one of the most influential villains on the isle, Mal has never  _ actually  _ put her head fully underwater.

So. Mal’s feet go out from under her, and in the second before her head slips under, she’s not fucking bright enough to figure out that hey, she’s going to need to shut her stupid mouth or else get a big ol’ mouthful of that sweet, sweet lake water that’s been marinating students and fish in it for gods only know how many years of slime growth.

It hurts. The water is still cold enough to make her face tingle, and the sensation floods into her mouth, into her lungs, before Mal can think to stop it. She closes her mouth a second later, working on sheer shocked instinct, but instead of helping it just means that she swallows a huge mouthful of the water already in her mouth, and it goes down the wrong way, of course it does, because woman is not meant to try and swallow lake water while also falling on her ass at the same time. Mal’s traitorous lungs, working on reflex, go to cough the water up again, which, again, goes about as well as Mal’s thinking brain could have predicted.

Of course, this is the moment that Ben chooses to resurface. 

Mal smacks him in the face.

In her defense, she didn’t mean to. It’s just that she thought she was drowning and tried to cling to the upright object that had appeared suddenly by her side, only her arms weren’t really something that she was under full control of, per se, and okay, she does feel a little bit bad about how hard she hit him.

Ben reels back, still holding Mal upright. “What the fuck,” he gasps.

Mal hits him again. “I thought you were dead, you idiot!” she says. “I can’t fucking swim! I was trying to save your life!”

“You didn’t need to hit me!”

Mal wants to hit him again. “I was drowning.” She explains, in a way that is very calm considering the circumstances and also the potential fish attacks that could happen at literally any minute. “I panicked.”

Ben shifts his grip so that he’s holding her in something like a proper princess carry, rather than the frantic lifesaving grip he’d had when he pulled her out of the water. “You weren’t drowning,” he says kind of sulkily. “I wouldn’t have let you drown.”

Mal lets her mouth fall open again. She’s being held by an honest-to-gods-prince, being carried like a pretty princess back to dry land, so she feels that she’s allowed some drama without potentially endangering her life yet again. “I was trying to save you!” she says. “I thought you were the one drowning!”

Ben frowns. “No.” he says shortly. “I know how to swim.”

“I know that!” Mal says. She would stomp her foot if she could. “You didn’t come back, so I panicked!”

Ben doesn’t stop carrying her, but he does look away, back over towards the cliffs that totally would have hidden his body if he had drowned. “I needed to take a minute,” he says. “It’s called the enchanted lake for a reason, you know. It’s one of the most magical places in the kingdom.”

Of course it is. Mal should have noticed. No amount of cold lake water can give her the tingling sensation of somebody else’s magic on her skin. She’s a dragon, the cold doesn’t bother her and anyway, if she hadn’t been so focused on keeping herself alive, she would have noticed it on her own.

Aw, fuck. If it’s magic, that means-- 

“Magical like, wow, it’s so pretty?” Mal tries. “What a magical afternoon we’re having here together?”

They’re almost at the dock again. Ben sets Mal down, ever so gently, so she can walk the last few feet on her own. The water’s only up to her knees here, even if there are possibly carnivorous fish about.

“Magical like, it’s used as a healing water.” Ben says. “It erases any spells that are affecting the people who drink it. Or bathe in it.”

Shit.

“I can explain,” Mal tries. “It’s just, um—”

Ben hops up onto the dock and offers Mal a hand up. Even when he’s going to send her back to the Isle for being a traitor, he’s still so  _ nice. _

“Hey,” he says, once she’s up and has stuttered herself to a halt. “I get it. You love spelled me because you didn’t know what else to do, right?”

Huh.

“Yes,” Mal says. “Yep. That is exactly what I did. I love spelled you because I didn’t know what else to do, that’s exactly it. I just, you know, felt that connection, like, right from the start, and on the isle, you know, we don’t really do dating, so!”

Ben nods. “It’s different here,” he says seriously. “I know there’s some cultural differences that you guys need to learn, but there’s a reason love spells have been banned even under the Reasonable Restrictions act. If I were someone else, I could get you deported back to the isle for even making a love spell.”

Mal’s had years of dealing with Maleficent’s threats, so she’s pretty fucking excellent at keeping a poker face, if she does say so herself. Never mind the ice that’s working its way through her blood at the thought of being returned to the isle, though. She’s got a prince to placate.

“Oh?” Mal manages. “That’s—nobody told us that.”

Ben frowns. “Nobody thought you would try,” he says. “We assumed you would follow the crowd, at least a little bit.”

“Surprise?” Mal says weakly. “I’m a little bit special. It’s the whole villainy thing.”

Something on her face must reflect the blind panic that she’s feeling, because Ben backpedals.

“Hey, no!” he says. “We’re not—I’m not actually going to get you sent back! I’m just saying, if you tried to spell the wrong person, or, uh, if you sold them to anyone—”

“We didn’t.” Mal cuts in. “It was just a one-off, I swear.”

Ben flashes her a little smile. “Good,” he says. “I’d be really upset if you were going around spelling all the boys.”

Oh. If this is how they’re going to play it, Mal can play along.

She leans in. “I’d never spell another boy,” she says. “It’s just—you’re irresistible. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Ben leans back. “Magical roofies aren’t love, Mal. They’re illegal at best.”

Mal ducks her head. “I know.” Keep calm, look cute, channel her inner Evie. “I’m sorry for doing it. I just didn’t know how else to get you to notice me.”

Mal glances up through her lashes. And her wet, slimy hair. Oops. Not so much her inner Evie, then. Ben doesn’t look like he’s completely disgusted by her very existence though, so that’s a win. Upset, sure. Mad, even. But not disgusted.

“You can’t just go around spelling people!” Ben says, gesturing wildly. “It’s not something we do here! If you wanted to get my attention, you already had it! I wanted to know the real you, Mal, even before you spelled me. That first day, when I saw you get out of the car, you already  _ had  _ my attention. There’s something here, I’m sure of it, but I don’t know how we’re going to work it out if you keep doing things like  _ spelling me. _ ”

There’s an ache building up in Mal’s chest. “I didn’t know what else to do!” she cries. “You weren’t—you were with Audrey! I didn’t have any other choice!”

“You could have talked to me!” Ben shouts back. “I was only with Audrey because my parents want me to marry her! She’s my  _ friend,  _ but she’s not the only girl I’ve ever looked at! I’m allowed to break up with her, it’s not like we’ve signed a contract, jeez.”

Mal feels—not quite as gleefully evil as she’d hoped. Ruining other people’s relationships is supposed to be fun. 

“I didn’t mean to ruin it,” she says softly. “I just wanted to have a chance.”  _ At getting the wand. At being with you. _

Ben reaches out to tap the back of her fist, where it’s clenched tight in the fabric of her skirt. “Hey now,” he says. “Would Evie like it if you come back with that all wrinkled?”

Mal shakes some of the water out of her hair. “No,” she admits, unclenching the fist. “She’s going to be really mad that I got this dress wet.”

Ben gives her hand a little squeeze. “Let me dry you off, okay?”

Mal shivers. “Okay.” She is cold, and it can’t hurt to let Ben give her a towel. He’s not throwing her back to the isle yet, and that’s got to mean something, even if the love spell was a colossal failure.

The towel settles soft and warm around Mal’s shoulders.

“I’m still mad at you for spelling me.” Ben says, “But I think we’re going to do better at this whole talking thing when we’re both warm and dry, yeah? What’d you say we put this on hold until we get back to the castle?”

Mal pulls the towel tight around her shoulders. “I think that sounds very reasonable of you, princeling,” she says. “A very wise decision.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also on [the tumblr now](https://thebluestbluewords.tumblr.com/) if y'all wanna hang out!


End file.
